Outline your lawn and see what turf would cost to lay, what your grass costs you now in water and mowing, and how long the change takes to pay for itself.
Sometimes, and this calculator says so when it does not. Turf pays back fastest where a lawn is watered through a dry season on a high municipal tariff and cut by a mowing service whose fee would stop. Where a gardener keeps coming for the rest of the garden, or the owner mows and the lawn is rain-fed, it costs little to keep and turf may never earn back its installation. The estimate also counts what the money could have earned instead.
Municipal water is sold on a rising block tariff. The house uses the cheap first blocks; the lawn is watered on top of that, in the dearest ones. In Cape Town the next kilolitre above a typical household’s use costs over R80 once the sewerage charged on water used is included.
Close enough to plan and budget on a clear, recent image, but not to cut from. Trees and shade hide edges, imagery can be a few years old, and slopes look smaller from above. That is why the calculator asks about gradient, and why any installer will measure on site before ordering.
Save the estimate as a PDF. It carries the cutting plan, the build-up and the itemised materials. That is what an installer needs to quote against, and what you need to compare quotes line by line. Where two quotes differ a lot, check the depth of the base and the amount of infill first.
No. Your address, your outline and your answers never reach us: the estimate is worked out in your browser. To do that, the address goes to a geocoding service, the map position to the providers of the aerial photos, and your location, rounded to about a kilometre, to NASA for climate data. Those services keep ordinary request logs under their own policies. Your outline is never saved anywhere. Your answers, such as the turf you picked and how you water, are remembered on your own device so the form is filled in next time, and clearing your browser data removes them.